We are pleased to present this co-edited volume, “Female Leadership Identity in English Language Teaching: Autoethnographies of Global Perspectives”. There are 25 emerging and developing women leaders in English Language Teaching (ELT) who have contributed to this volume. Their leadership journeys span across geographical, cultural, and ideological boundaries in several contexts in Africa, Asia, North America, and South America.
Background to the Volume: The Story of Collaboration
Doaa
In 2019, the world was surprised by an invisible threat; a virus that challenged our daily life and practices in ways that will continue to unravel over time. I had just started a new position in the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. My new role took me slightly away from the ELT field where I spent my entire professional career serving as an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teacher in Egypt, an English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher, a teacher educator, and a M.A. TESOL (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages) program director in the United States. For a moment, it seemed that I was losing my ELT professional identity, my relationship with my colleagues, memories of my students, and many more now that I am situated within the realm of World Languages. I, however, found great comfort in knowing that I still have my professional community of colleagues who continued to engage me in conversations, projects, and initiatives in ELT. With this kind of support, I was able to continue to take on leadership roles in ELT in the periphery of my formal position, and to offer webinars, workshops, and teacher professional development programs online and in person, and to share my experiences and knowledge with language teachers in different parts of the world. I credit these opportunities to membership in professional organizations, such as Maryland TESOL, TESOL International Association, NileTESOL, TESOL Arabia, and TESOL ELTA (English Language Teachers Association). In a sense, my ELT communities kept me connected, grounded, and growing. With a lifelong career in ELT and ELT leadership and a new path in World Languages (WL), I now exist in an in-betweenness space where I can cross the professional borders between ELT and WL s smoothly.
The pandemic created a space for reflection on those changes in my career paths as a transnational professional from Egypt, crossing geographical and
Debra
When Doaa Rashed first approached me to discuss working on a project on women’s leadership identity, I was immediately fascinated. I had advanced in my career from the classroom to academia and into the U.S. federal government, progressively moving into positions of increasing levels of responsibility. At the time that Doaa reached out, I was working at the U.S. Department of Education. As a senior federal leader, setting strategic direction for national educational initiatives, the topic of effective leadership was of immediate significance. And as a woman, I was living the questions related to leadership development and leadership identity, every day. I was continually evolving in my own leadership journey. I welcomed the opportunity to collaborate, to create a space where women could write, analyze, and share their leadership stories, so that others may learn. Our many conversations resulted in the Call for Proposals, and with the initial submissions, we began our journey together of working closely with the contributing writers. Upon reflection, the process that took this volume from idea conception to project completion is itself an example of women leadership enactment, collaboration, mutual respect, and reciprocal mentorship. We each brought our individual strengths and backgrounds to this project. During our many conversations, we took turns. We listened to each other. We listened to our writers. The result here is a unique volume of women’s voices, written by women leaders in ELT, edited by women leaders in ELT, for the purpose of engaging current and emerging women leaders.
The purpose of this edited volume is to engage in a conversation about leadership identity development in ELT that goes beyond positions and titles. Our goal is to gain a deeper understanding of professional ELT women’s experiences as they grow to see themselves as leaders as they move along their leadership path, especially as intersected with sociocultural constructs and within systems that perpetuate inequity and inequality. As Doaa Rashed discusses in Chapter 1 “Framing the Conversation”, while there are many female leaders in the ELT field, nonetheless, there is a lack of scholarship on how women in ELT develop leadership, enact a leadership role, and see themselves as leaders. This volume aims to address that gap. Further, although there are many women in the ELT field, overall, the voices of women leaders about their journeys are missing. This volume creates the space for women’s voices to be heard and for the “emotional labor” (Wilbur, Cowie and Damji, Chapter 11) of exploration of lived experiences to be examined through autoethnography.
Audience Engagement
This timely volume on women ELT leaders will be of interest to scholars and practitioners in second language teacher education undergraduate and graduate programs, language teacher professional development and professional growth coaches, mentors and mentees, educational consultants, practitioners whose work aims to support emerging leaders, who would like to create and maintain a supportive and inclusive workplace, and who aim to continue their own leadership development, and, also, ELT researchers who are interested in examining leadership identity development. To this end, the volume includes research-based chapters in the form of autoethnographies and collaborative autoethnographies.
We envision this volume to be used in formal and informal professional development contexts. The Discussion Questions at the end of each chapter encourage examination of key insights and invite readers to engage in self-reflection and reflexivity about their own professional and leadership journeys in their teaching settings within their local and global contexts.
The rich interdisciplinary autoethnographies provided in this volume serve as both a space for ELT women leaders to share in-depth analyses and reflections about the challenges and successes they encounter in enacting leadership, and a guide to the practices of doing autoethnography in studies on leadership identity in ELT. We hope the autoethnographies in this volume will
This volume is unique and innovative in many ways. As the reader embarks on their journey of exploring the autoethnographies, we encourage the reader to think about the following unique and innovative ways of perceiving, thinking about, and enacting leadership as offered by these women leaders:
- –Claiming Success: In each chapter, the women name their accomplishments, without apology or humbleness, but with pride and agency. They claim their hard-won victories.
- –Challenging the Lessons Learned from Girlhood: As these women leaders claim their success, they also challenge some lessons from childhood: lessons to be humble, not too proud, not too loud – And the women in these pages, instead, shout aloud denial of those early lessons, breaking the glass ceiling (and the bamboo ceiling and concrete ceiling), challenging the preferred positionality of the patriarchy.
- –Being the Mentor They Never Had: This volume is a collection of women writers who provide insights, lessons learned and stories of accomplishments, at times heroic, borne from a lifetime of professional vulnerabilities, confusing dichotomies, and often painful experiences. Together, these chapters offer a unique mentoring experience for readers. In essence, through their autoethnographies, these women become the mentors that they never had.
- –The Whole Woman: The narratives in our volume do not simply discuss leadership in operational ways – doing leadership. Rather the authors in this volume discuss leadership from the perspective of the whole woman, the whole human being, with multiple identities as daughter, sister, wife, mother, and professional roles of colleague, employee, and leader.
- –Building Solidarity, Sisterhood and Trusted Community: The women ELT leaders in this volume all call-on other women to engage in solidarity. Whether a chapter is solo-autoethnography or a collaborative autoethnography, there is a clear message that women in ELT need to build a trusted community to learn and grow in their leadership identities, and, in turn, to enact that leadership to dismantle systemic means of oppression and inequity.
- –Claiming the Right of Self-Love, Self-Trust, and Confidence: In these pages, we claim ourselves. We claim our birthright to love ourselves, to trust ourselves and to have confidence that we are worthy. We are enough, and we have the power of self-agency. The narratives here claim that birthright, each in their own way. And in claiming that birthright, we claim our female leadership identities.
As editors, we aimed to group the chapters in this volume in a coherent way that reflects the main emphasis each group shares in their leadership journeys. Therefore, we grouped them based on their approaches in examining leadership identity development and views of leadership, and the most salient sociocultural construct(s) that intersects with the contributors’ leadership identities. The chapters in this volume are divided into five parts.
In Part 1, Chapter 1 “Framing the Conversation”, Doaa Rashed discusses the conceptual and theoretical frameworks that guide the readers in engaging in intellectual, methodological, and reflective engagement with the chapters focusing on leadership identity in ELT, gaps in the literature in ELT women leaders’ identity, the intersectionality in identity studies, and the use of autoethnographies and narratives in examining one’s leadership identity development. Thus, this chapter sets the stage for the chapters to follow.
Part 2 presents autoethnographies that examine the intersectionality of gender and culture and their impact on leadership identity in diverse contexts. It starts with Chapter 2 “Power, Identity and Agency: An Autoethnographic Life History of a Latin American ELT Female Leader” by Lena Barrantes-Elizondo whose autoethnographic life history narrative examines the impact that power, language identity, and agency had on her leadership identity in Costa Rica. Chapter 3 “Power as a Lived Experience: The Negotiation of Professional Identity as a TESOL Leader” by Ana-Marija Petrunic explores the challenges of performing leadership and developing a leadership identity while on a leadership pathway in Canada. Chapter 4 “Pretending Everything was Fine: Serving as a Female Leader in Uncertain Territory” by Kate Mastruserio Reynolds illustrates the complexities of performing leadership in university settings that are dominated by traditional role expectations in Qatar and the impact of such complexities on her leadership identity. In Chapter 5 “Age, Power, Gender, and Identity Tensions: An Autoethnography of an African Female Leader”, Amira Salama narrates and analyzes her identity tensions in her professional life history in relation to gender, culture, and age that have shaped the development of her identity as a female leader in ELT context in Egypt and Africa ELTA. In Chapter 6, “A Leader’s Journey: From Followership to Leadership to ‘Academic Grandma’”, Debra Suarez explores her leadership development along key phases of her career, early, mid and late career. Chapter 7 “Reimagining Women Leadership in TESOL Advocating for Change, Harnessing Reflexivity, and Humanizing Practices” by Marie Webb, Quanisha Charles, Sarah Henderson Lee, Shannon Tanghe, and Gloria Park share the authors’ understanding of their experiences with leadership, and the emerging attributes and characteristics from their interactions
Part 3 includes four chapters that focus on issues related to race, power, gender, language ideologies, and their impact on ELT leadership identity. Chapter 8 “War, Language, and Leadership: A Female English Language Teacher Leader’s Perspective” by May F. Chung focuses on her leadership initiatives in decolonizing the national security English curriculum and promoting linguistic alternatives to humanize war victims while grappling with racial and gender assumptions about her as an Asian woman in a military university in the United States. In Chapter 9 “Still We Rise: Collaborative Autoethnographic Perspectives from Black Women in English Language Teaching and Leadership”, Ayanna Cooper, Tasha Austin, Mary Romney, Kisha Bryan, and Darlyne de Haan explore leadership identity development and forms of marginalization experienced by the authors and the ways in which they have navigated successful careers as Black women educators and leaders in various ELT contexts in the United States. In Chapter 10 “LEAPing as a Filipino in Korean ELT: My Journey towards Developing a Transformational Leadership Identity”, Teri Rose Dominica Roh examines her experiences as an emerging Filipino female ELT leader amid tensions surrounding a racialized non-native English-speaking teacher (NNEST) identity in Korea. In Chapter 11, “The Challenges and Opportunities for Decolonizing TESOL in the Canadian Context: Reflecting on Expressions of leadership”, Amea Wilbur, Taslim Damji, and Tanya Cowie explore the development and enactment of their leadership identities through an examination of the strategies they employed in decolonizing and addressing social injustice in their practices as educational leaders in post-secondary institutions in British Columbia, Canada.
Part 4 consists of four chapters that examine the challenges of being a transnational ELT woman in leadership roles in higher education. Chapter 12 “Border-Crossing: An Autoethnography of a Transnational Female faculty from Egypt in the United States” by Doaa Rashed traces the development and shifts in her leadership identity as a woman ELT practitioner and leader, transcending geographical and cultural boundaries while constantly crossing borders between different ideologies, attitudes, and expectations in Egypt and the United States. In Chapter 13 “Redefining Leadership in TESOL through Multimodal Collaborative Autoethnographic Inquiry: Perspectives from Transnational Women”, Cristina Sánchez-Martín and Su Yin Khor adopt a transnational perspective to examine their experiences at different American universities as multilingual scholars with transnational backgrounds (Spanish and Swedish/Malaysian, respectively). Chapter 14 “Situating the Self: Developing as a Transnational Latina Leader” by Xatli Stox reflects on her personal and social
Part 5 includes one chapter that presents emerging themes and new knowledge from all previous chapters. Chapter 16 “A Harmony of Voices: Complexity of Female Leadership Identity in ELT” by Doaa Rashed and Debra Suarez provides an in-depth review of the autoethnographies, highlighting insights regarding the complexity of female leadership identity in ELT. The editors share their understanding of the collective voice that arises from the autoethnographies in this volume, the challenges the women faced in developing and enacting their leadership identities in ELT. Finally, it provides some conclusions and recommendations for future directions.